About Chris Expertise I can answer pretty much any question relating to VB.NET and its use in a Windows environment. I specialize in ASP.NET web development and MSSQL database access.
Experience I have over 5 years of industry experience using VB.NET and other .NET technologies for web and database development.
Education/Credentials I have some college education, but does it really matter in this field of work?
Expert: Chris Date: 9/5/2007 Subject: Button Arrays
Question I'm trying to create an application (VB 2005 Express) that loads individual wave files into 'slots' to use for sound effects. Each slot has a play button, a stop button, and a pause button. The program runs fine but I'm programming each button. With 30 slots, that's a lot of editing! What is the best way to consolidate the click of each button? Here's the code I use for the play buttons (sb=secondary buffer):
Private Sub btnPlay1_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnPlay1.Click
If Not sb(0) Is Nothing Then
sb(0).Volume = vsVolume1.Value
sb(0).Play(0, IIf(chkLoop1.Checked, BufferPlayFlags.Looping, BufferPlayFlags.Default))
End If
End Sub
Thanks for your help.
Mike
Answer Sounds like the easiest thing for you to do here is to write a single event handler we'll call OnPlayButtonClick that will be shared by all of these play buttons, and fired whenever any of them is clicked. You can take advantage of the Button's .Tag property, this Tag property is present on all Windows Forms controls, and is basically defined as being there for whatever you want, though it's not official. Set the Tag property on each of these buttons to be the "sb" array index for the sound you want that button to play (eg: 0, 1, 2, ..., 29). Then, to wire them up to your event handler, instead of double-clicking them in design mode to create 30 separate events, you can wire them manually with the AddHandler directive in Form_Load as I show below:
Private Sub Form_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
AddHandler btnPlay1.Click, AddressOf OnPlayButtonClick
AddHandler btnPlay2.Click, AddressOf OnPlayButtonClick
AddHandler btnPlay3.Click, AddressOf OnPlayButtonClick
' ... repeat as necessary ...
AddHandler btnPlay30.Click, AddressOf OnPlayButtonClick
End Sub
So, btnPlay1.Tag should be set to 0, btnPlay2.Tag to 1, and so forth until btnPlay30 which should have a value of 29 in its .Tag property. Whenever a user clicks any of these, because of the AddHandler directives, they'll end up firing off this event below:
Private Sub OnPlayButtonClick(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs)
Dim btnClicked As Button = DirectCast(sender, Button)
Dim intSBIndex As Integer = Integer.Parse(btnClicked.Tag)
If (intSBIndex >= 0) AndAlso (intSBIndex < sb.Length) Then
If (Not sb(intSBIndex) Is Nothing) Then
sb(intSBIndex).Volume = vsVolume1.Value
sb(intSBIndex).Play(0, IIf(chkLoop1.Checked, BufferPlayFlags.Looping, BufferPlayFlags.Default))
End If
End If
End Sub
The only difference here from your original is that we're taking the "sender" parameter to the event, which should be the control that fired off the event. If the user clicks btnPlay4, this is what will be passed to the event handler as the sender, and we'll cast that back to a Button object, get its Tag property, and convert it to an Integer. Then, we'll use that as the index of the "sb" array, set the volume, and play the sound clip.
